WOMADelaide 2023 festival review: Space on earth to soar with angels
At Adelaide’s world music festival, children are not merely tolerated, but specifically catered for — and its nightly headline act was an angelic wonder that thrilled attendees of all ages.
After nearly two decades of attending festivals, first as a highly engaged teenage music fan and later as a scribe tasked with capturing these days and nights in words, for me WOMADelaide this year served up a strong dose of novelty.
For the first time, I entered a festival in dad mode, with my wife and our three-year-old son in tow. The headline attraction was one that I wanted us to experience as a family, having seen it solo five years earlier and been moved to tears at the sheer scale and unique beauty of the spectacle.
Our trio approach came with some obvious points of difference: much more time in the Kidzone sandpit than I’d spent in 2018, for instance; less time sipping beer in front of stages across three days of perfectly clear weather.
Overall mobility was greatly reduced – stomping to far-flung corners of the event’s gigantic Botanic Park footprint is taxing on little legs, and those of the parents carrying a 15kg load – but slowing down meant drinking more deeply from WOMAD’s cup than I had previously.
At this annual festival, children are not merely tolerated but specifically and extensively catered for. Each adult ticket purchaser is entitled to bring up to two children aged 12 or younger for free. Consequently, kids were everywhere; happily, their presence worked as a moderating influence against any anti-social behaviour.
When this year’s line-up was stacked with international artists for the first time since March 2020 due to Covid – a rather important detail for a festival whose acronym describes a “world of music, arts and dance” – locals and tourists alike responded by opening their wallets: three of the four days were sold out at a capacity of 30,000 people, with only Monday the laggard in that respect.
Big crowds meant unavoidably long queues for food, drinks and toilets – organisers could have easily doubled their order for the latter item and still have come up far too short – but the goodwill between patrons remained high.
Even the masses gathered before the main Foundation Stage for the Saturday night headliner Florence and the Machine – which I’m reliably informed was the biggest crowd on record at WOMADelaide – were as calm, controlled and friendly as any group of 25,000 or so strangers could be to one another, when packed in like sardines.
Backed by her powerful, if somewhat anonymous band, British singer Florence Welch led a clinic in vocal control and complete connection with an audience.
Barefoot and wearing a light green dress that billowed around her, the 36-year-old danced across the breadth of the stage – then swerved into the front row, as footage on the big screen showed her emoting directly into the faces of passionate fans in the front row. Welch was an undeniable force who floated like a butterfly, but her voice stung like a bee, complete with a sweet warble at the top end of her range.
Watching her up there, a quote by former Savage Garden frontman Darren Hayes came to mind. “A lead singer has to be ruthless,” he said recently on the Time to Talk podcast. “You come out on the stage, your ego can’t afford to fail. Whether it’s 10 people or an arena, you have to pee on every corner of that stage within the first two minutes – otherwise the audience will kill you.”
Forgive the vulgar analogy, but that’s precisely what Welch did at WOMADelaide: within two minutes, proverbial piss was everywhere, and this flame-haired wonder of a performer went on to pull focus for a further 85 minutes. Masterly.
While Welch was the standout among musical front people, two other singers came close to matching her presence. At dusk on the first day, Cuban powerhouse Cimafunk – aka 33-year-old Erik Rodriguez – led his tightly wound nine-piece band through a hot set of Afro-Cuban rhythms and African-American funk.
With energy and charisma that would challenge James Brown in his prime, the singer and his all-Cuban offsiders El Tribu (“The Tribe”) quickly whipped the crowd into an infectious party-starting mood that was perfect for a Friday evening.
Sung entirely in Spanish, this show was the kind of relentlessly upbeat display of musical brilliance that would get any festival crowd moving, at any time of the day or night, but WOMAD’s programming here was pitch perfect.
“My mission is to bring people happiness,” Cimafunk told The Australian last month: mission accomplished.
Also on Friday, British singer-songwriter Billy Bragg was booked on a smaller stage, but drew a huge crowd held in rapt attention with only his voice, stories, guitar playing and occasional keyboard accompaniment. When he tore into 1986 track There is Power in a Union, the full-throated response took the singer aback. Later, addressing Australia’s upcoming vote on an Indigenous Voice to parliament, he spoke of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union in 2016.
“I’m not from around here, but I have experience with referendums: they have a terrible propensity to bite you in the arse,” said Bragg, 65. Wearing a shirt in favour of the Voice, he urged the crowd to “think long and hard. It’s not just about your Indigenous brothers and sisters; it’s about how the world sees you and what kind of people you are. You have the chance to prove you’re not still the colonisers. You’re a young South Pacific country that takes care of the people that took care of this country for thousands of years.”
The main attraction this year is what first awed me in 2018. It wasn’t a musical act but a three-dimensional performance art piece; unusually, it occupied a prime-time slot in the main stage arena on all four nights, just as it did again this year.
Titled Place des Anges, or Place of Angels, the work is authored by French aerial circus company Gratte Ciel. Across 45 minutes, it involves the use of five cranes, a series of cables strung 50m in the air and dozens of climbers dressed in white, who descend via ziplines – some slow, some fast – while dropping ever-greater quantities of white duck feathers.
Later, a giant inflatable angel is paraded through the crowd, to be doused with feathers from the ziplines above while a booming soundtrack mixes dance with classical music; at its finale, an enormous number of feathers are blown skyward via machinery, and the angels stay on earth to dance and party with us, before flitting away backstage, leaving only memories – and a heavy dusting of feathers on the ground.
Place des Anges is one of those rare things in the modern world that isn’t really done justice by any attempt to capture snippets from a smartphone, or by a wide angle camera lens, or even by my feeble attempts here at describing the action. There’s no substitute for being in the thick of it, as feathers tumble down by the thousands, and looking around you and seeing people of all ages simply caught up in what they’re seeing, hearing and feeling.
There is really nothing else like it anywhere on the planet, and bringing the circus troupe back to Botanic Park – essentially to play its greatest hit, four nights in a row – was a masterstroke by the WOMADelaide organisers. Already a consuming spectacle in its own right, its crowd-centric dynamic has taken on a new resonance now that we’re on the other side of the pandemic’s mass gathering bans; long gone, but not forgotten.
Being there with my three-year-old helped deepen its impression, too. The look of wonder on his face as the work unfolded, the angels descended and the sky filled with feathers? The whole trip was worth it for that alone.
We saw it twice, Friday and Sunday; the second viewing was even better, as he knew what was coming, and the anticipation was even greater.
Something that Gratte Ciel’s artistic director, Stephane Girard, had said to me a few days earlier was ringing in my head on Sunday night, as I stood inside something that needs to be seen to be believed. Asked what he hoped my son – and any other child – would take away from their time within Place des Anges, this master of the otherworldly paused and gave a thoughtful response.
“This dimension where characters are so high and far away in the sky, flying as angels, is something that normally we would only expect in video games, animation films, or sci-fi movies,” said Girard via a translator.
“To make it real, and to show that it is possible to make that magic happen, is also to give wings to a young child and show them that anything is possible.
“It’s that,” he said, “And the intimacy we hope to give by making this immense ‘video game’ become a tactile and sensory experience, where we hope that he will feel caressed by a rain of feathers that will tickle his neck. We hope that he will also remember the softness of experiencing that.”
What Girard and co have authored is a glorious celebration of humanity that provokes deep feelings in anyone lucky enough to witness it. It’s remarkable, too, that the whole thing takes place without a word being said between performers and audience.
My son now talks about it using the name of one of Adelaide’s best-known rock exports: The Angels. Are we ever gonna see their faces again? I’ve no idea; the French troupe had never performed it twice at the same festival until this year in Adelaide.
But our time together awed in the feather storm has marked us as a family, just as it did so many others across the weekend. It is now part of our story that we’ll carry with us, gladly and gratefully.
The writer travelled to Adelaide as a guest of WOMADelaide.
More Coverage
